Over at Flack Central Station, conservative economist Arnold Kling sees a nefarious plot in the new survey-based happiness research, pioneered by Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith.

Referring to the paper How Not to Buy Happiness by Cornell economist Robert Frank, Kling writes:

... [I]t is Robert Frank who wants to impose a rigid conformity on our mode of living. In his model society everyone would commute by mass transit to work. So much for people who like to work from home, or live in a rural environment, or walk to work.

I am afraid that “happiness research” amounts to nothing but a flimsy excuse for left-wing academics to claim that they should be given control over how the rest of us live.

Kling doesn't bother mentioning that Frank makes no public policy recommendations in his paper. The paper could just as well be taken as personal advice to individuals: a Lexus won’t make you any happier than a Honda; you’ll be happier if you buy a smaller house close to where you work, instead of a large house far away; no one ever wished on his death bed that he’d spent more time at the office.

The most interesting passage in Kling’s essay is the following bit:

In making his case, Frank places a heavy intellectual burden on "happiness research." As I have pointed out before, economists traditionally have not bothered to try and measure happiness. We take it for granted that people act in their best interests.

Frank, on the other hand, takes seriously the notion that happiness can be measured by surveys. He views the fact that surveys show little increase in happiness over the past few decades as evidence that higher incomes do not lead to more happiness.

Frank’s problem, according to Kling, is that he takes new evidence seriously. Kling, on the other hand, is a virtuous economist who never questions traditional assumptions.

Kling reminds me of the Catholic priests railing against the Copernican revolution in astronomy:

It upsets the whole basis of theology. If the Earth is a planet, and only one among several planets, it can not be that any such great things have been done specially for it as the Christian doctrine teaches. If there are other planets, since God makes nothing in vain, they must be inhabited; but how can their inhabitants be descended from Adam? How can they trace back their origin to Noah's ark? How can they have been redeemed by the Saviour? (From the Wikipedia article on Galileo.)

Like the Catholic priests in the 17th century, Kling's world-view is upset by new evidence, and he'll add epicycle upon epicycle to preserve his central assumption.

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)

Jeff Jacoby has a moderately interesting column in today’s Boston Globe about reforming the redistricting process, citing Iowa’s use of an independent commission to set constituency boundaries—a practice that is also followed in Commonwealth countries like Britain and Canada. Needless to say, I’m generally in favor of such proposals; however, I do think there are two issues that ought to be of concern:

• If many or all districts are competitive, small vote swings—say, a nationwide increase in Democratic support by 1%—will lead to large changes in representation, a problem seen regularly in British and Canadian elections. Existing gerrymandered “safe seats” pretty much guarantee that small vote swings will only affect a limited number of seats, negating much of the “manufactured majority” aspect of plurality elections.
• Dilution of majority-minority districts, and other Voting Rights Act issues, could be problematic in states that are less homogenous than Iowa—which would be, er, most states. On the other hand, many of the most egregious districts from a gerrymandering point of view were specifically designed to meet VRA requirements. (This is less of an issue for people like me, who believe substantive policy representation is more important than descriptive representation, even though there is some evidence that at least some degree of descriptive representation improves policy responsiveness to minority groups.)

I also think most of the benefits of ending gerrymandering could be arrived at by using so-called “mixed PR” electoral systems—even a few “top up” seats in most states would negate all but the most egregious gerrymanders. However, about half the states don’t have enough representatives to make “mixed PR” really work for federal elections, and I’m not one of those who thinks the House of Representatives should be much bigger (although I would increase probably increase its size to allow any state not declining in population to not lose seats, and would definitely increase its size if a new state were admitted to the Union). Even in smaller states, though, I think it would be of value in state legislative elections.

For further reading: some recent discussion of the merits of top-up PR is available from Mandos of Points of Information and Andrew Coyne, albeit in the Canadian context.

Globe link via Eugene Volokh.

Pieter of Peaktalk is the latest person I’ve seen who notes an incredibly small “undecided” share of the electorate.

It seems to me that this flies in the face of everything political scientists believe about presidential elections; while the default reaction of most partisans, and independent leaners, is to vote for their party’s nominee (despite the caveat of reciprocal causation—party identification is influenced, in part, by the candidates fielded by the parties), it seems unusual for voters to declare themselves so firmly committed in the early stages of the fall campaign, and usually there is some shifting in commitments over time as the campaign continues. By contrast, the media analysis seems to reflect the degree of elite polarization, which—while high—is typical of presidential campaigns.

Via Abiola Lapite, I learned that this pathetic racist piece of shit is running for the Republican Congressional nomination in Tennessee’s 8th district, which includes part of Shelby County (although not Memphis).

Unfortunately, he’s the only one on the ballot. According to this AP story, Tennessee Republican leaders didn’t bother fielding a candidate, since the 8th district is considered a safe Democratic seat for Rep. John Tanner.

The polls will be closing in about ten minutes. Nevertheless, I’d like to wish good luck to Dennis Bertrand, who is running as a write-in candidate.

UPDATE: The racist piece of shit is in the lead, 4907 to 416, with 48% of precincts reporting. Sigh.

UPDATE 2: The racist has won. This has not been a good week for race relations in western Tennessee.

My first thought on seeing the headline

Recreational Use of Viagra on the Increase

was, “What other sort of use is there?”

On second thought, however, there are some people who use it professionally, or so I’ve been told.

I somewhat agree with both Glenn Reynolds and Lorie Byrd that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad (link only works in Internet Explorer) is “devastating”—mind you, leaving aside the truth of the charges it makes against John Kerry. And I think the Kerry campaign is going to have to do much better than threatening to sue any TV station or network that airs the ad, even if the ad is maliciously false and libelous under the NY Times v. Sullivan standard—a legal standard public opinion doesn’t care much about.

That said, charges of lunacy toward some of the “Swift Boat Veterans” (say that six times fast!) are flying on both sides of the political aisle, while Steven Taylor is skeptical and cautious, but points out three reasons that the SBVfT account of events may indeed be credible:

1. It strikes me as odd that a large number of veterans would come together to make these allegations, knowing the amount of public and media scrutiny they would have to endure. ...
2. The leader of this group, and the first named author on the book, Houston lawyer John O’Neil, has had some compelling character witnesses, if you will, who also give me pause for thought. ...
3. Mr. Kerry’s own words give credence to some of the accusations.

On the other hand, I agree with von of Obsidian Wings that it’d be real nice to have the actual evidence these accusations are based on before pronouncing judgment on their veracity—or, for that matter, the sanity of Kerry’s accusers.

For some odd reason, the ntp server on my laptop refuses to keep sync with any servers on the Internet; instead, it’s decided to just go off and run several minutes slow, for some odd reason I can’t quite understand. Maybe it’s a 2.6.8-rc kernel bug or something. I noticed it yesterday too—my laptop lost nearly a half-hour over a day, somehow.

Stephen Bainbridge (via Glenn Reynolds) isn’t impressed with the use of NOMINATE scores to cast John Kerry as more of a centrist; nor is he particularly thrilled with methods like NOMINATE to begin with:

Personally, I find the interest group scores much more accessible and transparent. For one thing, NOMINATE counts all nonunanimous roll calls, which can include a lot of procedural and uncontroversial (even nonpartisan) bills. The interest group rankings focus on bills that really tell us something about the political philosophy of the candidate in question. For another, the interest group ratings are widely used both by the media and, perhaps more important, by politicians themselves.

I’d respond that NOMINATE (and related methods) are preferable to interest group scores precisely because they count all nonunanimous roll calls; this avoids the selection effect where interest groups choose, say, twenty “key” votes as a litmus test for an entire session. And, presumably, those who vote on party lines on “nonpartisan” and “uncontroversial” bills are even more partisan than those who join with their natural opposition. Another worthy point in favor of NOMINATE: the “procedural” versus “substantive” distinction is largely subjective; cloture votes in the Senate, for example, are technically procedural motions to end debate (and potentially stop a filibuster), while procedural votes on rules in the House often have serious substantive consequences (by ruling certain amendments out-of-order, framing and controlling debate, and sometimes even amending the legislation in question).

Now, Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers are quite correct to point out that the statistical properties of NOMINATE are, at best, nebulous, although Lewis and Poole recently made a worthy effort to gain additional leverage on the bias and uncertainty of NOMINATE in Political Analysis. And, while some of the differences in the results of the techniques are the result of differences between the distributional assumptions of NOMINATE and the CJR scaling method* (which explains the differing positions of Kerry in years in which he missed a lot of roll calls), there are some good reasons to prefer the CJR technique—most notably, it’s significantly more tractable; you can estimate the model almost trivially using MCMCpack.

Anyway, for those with a morbid curiosity about these techniques, the latest American Political Science Review has an article by Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers called “The Statistical Analysis of Roll-Call Data,” which I recommend highly (and which you may or may not be able to access via this link).

I’ve posted previously on NOMINATE and related methods (again, in relation to John Kerry’s voting record) here and here. This is my entry in today’s Beltway Traffic Jam.

Michael Totten has the scoop on the latest idiocy from the Memphis city council, this time perpetrated by city council chairman Joe Brown, who barred a group of visiting Iraqi officials from city hall, apparently out of concern that they were terrorists. Nor could the city or county mayor be bothered to meet with the group. On the bright side (?), at least they did get to meet mayoral aspirant and city councilwoman Carol Chumney, albeit not at city hall. Needless to say, Memphis-area residents are uniformly shocked, but not all that surprised, by this boorish behavior from their elected leaders.

One suspects that, overall, the Iraqis are better off not having had a chance to meet these rather dubious examples of American officialdom, lest they set a bad example.

Update: Mike Hollihan has more on the fallout from this mess; Chumney is making some political hay with the issue, but I honestly don’t see how she beats Herenton in a head-to-head contest, despite the latter apparently being under investigation by the FBI.

One of the little ways us wanna-be professors make a little side money (a couple hundred bucks a pop) is by reviewing textbooks for publishers. At the moment, I’m reviewing an American government textbook for its n+1th edition, which is nothing unusual, except what they sent me to review is the nth edition—which I already had a copy of at home anyway, since I was planning to adopt it for American government in the fall until O’Connor and Sabato was foisted upon me. So I guess I’m technically “pre-reviewing” it, or “post-reviewing” the nth edition, or something. And, in four chapters, I’ve only managed to come up with about a page of comments (and mostly silly stuff like “Unorthodox Lawmaking rocks, add it to the recommended readings on Congress,” rather than stuff like “only an idiot would write this paragraph”). I guess that means it’s a good book or something, but for $X I think they want more than a page of comments.

Michael Jennings has been taking a crash course in R and S-PLUS programming. I’d still have to say my R is quite weak, for largely the same reasons my Perl is pretty weak—there’s too much overlap with C, which leads to bad coding style.

Probably the moral of the story is either that I need to start working with RPy, or need to figure out how to convince colleagues that becoming more proficient in R (and contributing to it) is hireable/tenurable activity.

Since arriving in Ann Arbor last week, I’ve had something of a curious reaction to the revelation that I have a job. The near-uniform reaction, after hearing the details of the position, is that it’s a “heavy” load—which, given that it’s three courses a semester (or “3–3,” in the lingo) and five* preparations over the year, I suppose is a fair assessment, although it’s something of a godsend compared to the 4–4s at complete backwaters (“Research support? That’s your desk.”) I interviewed for, and the load itself doesn’t account for the relatively small classes or the generally engaged undergraduate student body. It’s enough to put something of a damper on my enthusiasm for starting my job in the fall.

Now, it’s possible that these folks just aren’t attuned to the realities of the academic job market, or perhaps just don’t recognize that for many potential scholars, taking a job at a non-Ph.D.-granting institution is a necessity rather than a preference. But it’s also possible that they’re on to something; is it possible that several years’ training as a researcher and methodologist is pretty much wasted if most of what I do the rest of my career is teach “textbook” political science and bivariate regression to undergraduates? Should I really settle for teaching three classes a semester when I could go elsewhere and teach three courses a year, if the research expectations for tenure are such that I’d end up doing the same amount of work anyway, especially when you account for the lack of graduate assistants?

The decision may, in the end, be made for me—if this past year’s experience is any guide, serious research institutions aren’t exactly clamoring to hire graduates of lower-tier (or even middle-tier) Ph.D. programs. But I suppose it’s something I’ll have to bear in mind this fall.

The CDC’s Division of Parasitic Diseases has reported that many Americans are getting sick each summer from diseases spread in public pools.

One of the largest pool-related outbreaks in the country happened last August in Lawrence, Kansas, when as many as 600 people may have been sickened by the parasitic disease cryptosporidium. The CDC found that the parasite was spread through local pools, day care centers and people who lived together.

This summer, the Lawrence-Douglas County health department has been trying to help pool operators and swimmers learn how to keep their pools germ-free. The No. 1 message: Don’t swim if you have diarrhea.

Indeed.

Digital Camera Shopper magazine reports that most digital camera memory cards are virtually indestructible:

They were dipped into cola, put through a washing machine, dunked in coffee, trampled by a skateboard, run over by a child's toy car and given to a six-year-old boy to destroy.

Perhaps surprisingly, all the cards survived these six tests.

Obviously they can only be destroyed by casting them into the volcanic furnace in Mordor in which they were forged.

Glenn Reynolds links a USA Today report on its post-convention poll:

Last week’s Democratic convention boosted voters’ impressions of John Kerry but failed to give him the expected bump in the head-to-head race against President Bush, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll finds.

In the survey, taken Friday and Saturday, Bush led Kerry 50%-46% among likely voters. Independent candidate Ralph Nader was at 2%.

The survey showed Kerry losing 1 percentage point and Bush gaining 4 percentage points from a poll taken the week before the Boston convention.

The change in support was within the poll’s margin of error of ±4 percentage points in the sample of 763 likely voters. But it was nonetheless surprising, the first time since the chaotic Democratic convention in 1972 that a candidate hasn’t gained ground during his convention.

In fairness, the report’s headline (“Poll: No boost for Kerry after convention”) is appropriate, and I’m generally all for the reporting of null results when they are substantively interesting. But I wonder how many readers will really appreciate the meaninglessness of the change in support, given that the disclaimer is after the discussion of the marginals, which show a statistical dead heat and zero meaningful change since the previous poll.

I went to the 11:10 pm show of Dodgeball last night, and found it hysterically funny. Ben Stiller as fitness magnate/doofus White Goodman is clearly the central comedic character (and parry to Vince Vaughn’s slacker straight man character), but I found the pairing of Gary Cole (as “Cotton McKnight”) and Jason Bateman (“Pepper Brooks”) as the ESPN8 commentary team the perfect send-up of sportscaster pretentiousness and inanity. Plus, you’ve got to applaud including a bar named “The Dirty Sanchez” in a PG-13 film.

I’ve posted a review of Reiner Knizia’s game Modern Art at Settling Catan.

As James Joyner notes, Nomar Garciaparra was traded from the Red Sox to the Cubs in a 4-team deal that would seem to put the Cubs in a pretty good position, but which looks to David Pinto like something of a firesale for the Sox—even though they did get Doug Mientkiewicz and Orlando Cabrera in the deal.

I suppose this also means that Jimmy Fallon will have to learn to play another character than “annoying Boston guy who screams ‘Nomar’ and makes out with Rachel Dratch at the drop of a hat.” But given SNL’s track record on such things, maybe not…

Nick Troester (apparently, it rhymes with “toaster”) is under the impression that last evening’s events fall under the Chatham House Rules. My personal perspective is that it’d be hard to enforce those rules, considering that all activities took place in public venues, but I’m still leaning toward relative confidentiality, if only for the sake of the honor of our mixed company (or at least for my continued employment).

I will, however, note that Kevin, Leslie, and I did make it to the ICPSR picnic on Saturday, something that cannot be said for others of our group.

BTW, I did find my hat… it was in my backpack all along.

Prof. Bryan Caplan revels in his nerdiness at Marginal Revolution.

In case you haven't guessed, yes, I consider myself a nerd. I'm such a nerd that I worry that my sons will fail to embrace their nerd heritage. The best game show in history, Beat the Geeks, began by asking each contestant "What's the geekiest thing about you?" I still wish I could have been a contestant just to give my response:

"I am the Dungeon Master for an all-economists' Dungeons and Dragons game."

Beat that, geeks!

That sounds like a challenge to me. Or perhaps a new blog-meme. Okay, here’s the geekiest thing about me:

I met my wife because we were both subscribed to a Sandman fanzine entitled Dream Lovers.

And to tie it all together, here’s a blast from the past: a mailing list discussion on free will from 1995 between Caplan, me, and several others. In the midst of this discussion, I announce my engagement. Wow, it’s been nine years.

IIRC, Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, founder of the Wikipedia, was also a member of that mailing list. Although maybe that was a different philosophy mailing list.

Chip Taylor solicits comment from political scientists on last weekend’s New York Times Magazine piece on the efforts to create a Democratic-leaning interest group infrastructure to rival the similar arrangements on the right. He writes:

That made me think about the Reform Party. After Perot was done dabbling in presidential politics, the Reform Party infrastructure was left with no real leader or agenda. It did have state and local party officials across the country, ballot access in many states, and eligibility for at least one more round of public funding for its presidential candidate.

Consequently there was a struggle between Buchanan and his organization and (if memory serves) the Natural Law Party apparatus (such as it is was). Neither was exactly committed to the principles of the Reform Party (to the extent that they existed); they were after the political assets of the Reform Party organization.

Now, I’m not saying that the Democratic Party is anywhere near the empty shell the post-Perot Reform Party was. But it seems that to the extent it is composed of coalitions of disparate interest groups, it is more vulnerable to a “hostile takeover.”

I wrote about this topic late last year:

With the institutional power of American parties in rapid decline relative to both candidates and interest groups (witness George Soros’ large donation to MoveOn.org, rather than the Democrats), thanks to the incumbency advantage, widespread adoption of open primaries, and McCain-Feingold, it seems likely that the United States will see more of these fights for the heart and soul of the party, as candidates and interest groups try to gain control of the remaining institutional advantages of the major parties—their automatic access to the ballot and their “brand recognition.” Why build a third party from scratch when you can just hijack the Republicans or Democrats?

More broadly, I think American politics has moved away from the system of parties articulating voter preferences (articulated in part here by James Joyner) to a system in which interest groups are the primary vehicle for public influence of the political process—with electoral competition something of a vestigial sideshow, necessitated more by constitutional requirements and the need for some elected oversight of the bureaucracy than it is required for functioning representative government. I don’t know that the central thesis here is anything too original—go read Schattschneider or Dahl—but I think political actors have finally come to recognize this reality in a way that they didn’t before, prodded largely by the search for loopholes in campaign finance laws and continual weakening of the institutional position of political parties in the system.

I think Bryan Caplan has really stepped in one here:

Larry Bartels has gotten national attention for his work on Bush’s income tax cut, inheritance tax cut, and public opinion. (Here is the full article; here is the digest version; here is what Alex Tabarrok had to say about Bartels). Bartels’ main point is that public opinion verges on contradictory: the public believes that inequality has gone up, agrees that inequality is bad, agrees that the rich should pay more taxes, BUT still supports two tax cuts that mostly benefit the rich.

Bartels is right, although since I belong to the tiny minority of people who favors however much inequality the free market delivers, for once I have to celebrate the public’s folly.

What Bartels does not seem to realize, however, is that the contradiction he laments is only one of many. [emphasis added]

I suspect very strongly that Prof. Bartels does realize this, as he is one of the foremost experts on public opinion in American politics. Mind you, Caplan’s broader post is a nice primer on the contradictions in public opinion that political scientists have known about (and attempted to explain) since the 1960s—contradictions that Bartels, and any other political scientist studying public opinion, would be well aware of.

Tyler Cowen calls on Dan Drezner to self-assign p values to his fence-sitting. My gut feeling is that this approach would be ineffective; based on the cognitive psychology literature, I’d have to conclude that Dan is probably not the best judge of his own objective probabilities. Instead, I recommend employing content analysis of Dan’s posts to arrive at estimated p values at given points in time, or using a panel of raters, or some other more accurate technique.

Incidentally, the only p value I have a good handle on for myself is that p=1.00 that, on election night, I will be sitting with my undergraduate methods class at some venue with available libations making fun of Brokaw, Rather, and/or Jennings on the big-screen as they call (and uncall) states. Assuming the dean doesn’t put the kibosh on the short field trip, that is…

Here’s my lame-ass election prediction: Kerry wins. And you can take that to the bank. At least, you can take it to the bank that you took my “Dean will be the nominee and Osama (not to be confused with Obama) will get a woody” prediction to (I suspect the tellers there aren’t that bright).

Now if I can just buy the Kreskin outfit and crystal ball prop from the local magic supply store, I’ll have some real respect in this discipline.

Eugene Volokh, defending the legal profession from charges that the This song is your song controversy is all the lawyers’ fault, writes:

But at most what we have here is a few special lawyers-by-training -- many of whom are no longer even lawyers in private service, but are lawmakers of one sort or another -- making unsound decisions. We do not have some general ethical failing on the part of the legal profession as a whole.

I don’t have anything substantive to say about Prof. Volokh’s post, but this does give me an opportunity to advance a linguistic mission of mine: to bring about a distinction between the words lawyer and attorney.

Now I’m not claiming this is distinction is found standard American English, but I think it would be a good distinction to make.

If we make the distinction, a lawyer is a person who has a certain professional training, whereas an attorney is a person, usually a lawyer, who represents people in their legal affairs.

An attorney is not necessarily a lawyer. Judges and law clerks are almost always lawyers, but (at least in the federal judiciary), they are not permitted to be attorneys. And someone who decides to represent himself in a legal matter is his own attorney, even though he may not be a lawyer.

We may make a similar distinction between doctor and physician. Senator Bill "Cat Murderer" Frist is a doctor, since he has a medical degree, but he is no longer a physician.